Tam Hunt writes:

Life seems to be tied to bioelectricity at every level. The late electrophysiologist and surgeon Robert Becker spent decades researching the role of the body’s electric fields in development, wound healing, and limb regrowth. His 1985 book, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, was a fascinating deep dive into how the body is electric through and through—despite our inability to see or sense these fields with our unaided senses. But Becker’s work was far from complete.

One scientist who has taken up Becker’s line of inquiry is Michael Levin. He got hooked on the subject after he read The Body Electric. Levin has been working on “cracking the bioelectric code,” as a 2013 paper of his put it, ever since. “Evolution,” Levin has said, “really did discover how good the biophysics of electricity is for computing and processing information in non-neural tissues,” the many thousands of cell types that make up the body, our word for trillions of cells cooperating. “It’s really hard to define what’s special about neurons,” he told me. “Almost all cells do the things neurons do, just more slowly.”

His team at Tufts University develops new molecular-genetic and conceptual tools to probe large-scale information processing in regeneration, embryo development, and cancer suppression—all mediated by bioelectric fields in varying degrees. This work involves examining, for example, how frogs, which normally don’t regenerate whole limbs (like salamanders do) can regrow limbs, repair their brains and spinal cords, or normalize tumors with the help of “electroceuticals” (a pun based on “pharmaceuticals”). These are therapies that target the bioelectric circuits of tumors instead of, or together with, chemical-based therapies. Bioelectric fields are, in other words, more powerful than we have suspected and perform many surprising roles in the human body and all animal bodies. [Continue reading…]